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coolnumbr12 writes "Chris Sevier, a 36-year-old man from Tennessee, got so addicted to porn videos that his wife took his children and left him. Now he has sued Apple saying the company failed to install any filter in its devices to prevent his addiction. In a 50-page complaint, Sevier calls Apple a 'silent poisoner' responsible for the proliferation of 'arousal addiction, sex trafficking, prostitution, and countless numbers of destroyed lives.' Sevier is seeking damages from Apple, but said he we will drop the lawsuit if Apple agrees to sell devices with a 'safe mode.'"

Normally, I'm not this paranoid, but this reads like a false flag operation by some religious group looking to get filters installed by default. At the very least, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they're helping fund this insane lawsuit.

Reason and faith are only incompatible when they intersect to the detriment of the former. There's plenty of stuff that could logically exist that we have no evidence for, and possibly never will. You can select an outcome in those cases and they would have to be based on faith.

And as for everything else, most people without recourse to proper equipment or resources have to take many of the more obscure scientific theories on faith. Some people do not, and that is how you end up with conspiracy theories becoming prevalent in the face of scientific knowledge. Conspiracy theorists are fine with science itself, they just have no faith in the results that have been presented to them by certain authorities. That is an important difference.

Faith is not important for science, but it is important for the acceptance of the results of science, when those results are not obvious and easily repeatable by the layperson. Scientific advancement benefits as much from credulity, as you would put it, as religion does.

I acknowledge the nature of an "unseen" world where ideas and thought originate but for which we have no physical proof--some call it "spiritual." I do not believe in it however as I'm still learning more about nature every day. I do not secretly long for the death of those who do not see as I do like the acolytes of these fundamentalist sects do. I grew up in a fundamentalist sect which many people have great things to say about its people, but the truth is that they taught their people that those not i

When Jesus was ask what was the greatest commandment, he said "love". Love your neighbor and love God, all the law and the prophets hang on those two, Christ said. So anyone teaching hate toward anyone is teaching the opposite of Christianity.

Certainly that happens, just as the guy selling fake "bomb detectors" claimed science, fools and charlatans sometimes claim God. Their claim is just as bogus though, as Christ clearly directed us to love those who oppose as we love ourselves, even fact even MORE than we love ourselves, love them as he loved us.

First of all I said "The *Bible* teaches hate". I don't know why you chose to misinterpret what I said. The fact is that Christians could have simply omitted the old testament from their holy book. They chose to keep, and are therefore subject to criticisms of the old testament.

The "ancient Jewish scriptures" didn't simply acknowledge that hate existed. They are included in your Bible as the word of God, and command hate. If you don't think the old testament should be included in the Bible, maybe you should create your own sect of Christianity as many others have done.

Even if you did this, it wouldn't mean that Christianity was only love. It would only mean that your version of Christianity was only love. Everyone else's version would still be a mix of hate and love, until you converted them to your version.

Second of all, the new testament also has some pretty terrible stuff in it. On the whole it looks quite progressive compared to the old testament, but compared with modern sensibilities it is barbaric.

Thirdly it is all irrelevant anyway because it's not real. Religion evolves. The leaders will continue to have "divine revelations" of new scripture or new interpretations of scripture in order to continuously drag this antiquated mythology into the present, ever diluting and politically correcting it's message.

How much can you change Christianity and still have it count as Christianity? They've already gotten rid of genocide, slavery, mysogeny, through new interpretations. Maybe we can get rid of miracles and Jesus and God.

The new message can be this:

Sure Jesus was just a man. That's why his teachings were full of flaws that contradict our current knowledge and sense of morality. We modern Christians are able to fix these flaws in a way that we think Jesus (if he lived today) might approve. We still believe in the golden rule and being compassionate, but we've grown out of the idea of supernatural deities as childish and primitive.

The problem is that Christianity is quite contradictory. It teaches both love and hate.

It doesn't really. The Bible has this contradiction in it, but the thing that most of the hateful xians seem to forget is that, according to their own dogma, Christ came to Earth and died on the cross in order to complete the old covenant established by the rules of the old testament, and to establish a new relationship with their God based on love. It's true that Jesus had more than a few quite famous temper tantrums and blowups against certain people in the book, but that was never about the person themselves, or the actions even, it was the location for the actions. The parable about the money changers in the temple, for example, wasn't about the moneychanging itself, it was about the fact that it was happening inside a temple, and was debasing the purpose of the temple to become a financial institution. And of course, the favourite thing for the "devout" to hate, homosexuality, isn't even mentioned in the gospels.

The ones who actually practice what they preach (and what's taught in the book they espouse) are quite accepting of those around them, and are usually pretty easy to deal with.

And no, I'm not a Christian. I was raised in a fairly liberal and open-minded Anglican family, and don't really have much use for the Christian God in my life. I don't really care one way or another whether God exists, nor do I feel like I need fear of damnation to give me a reason to treat those around me with respect.

If you think past the teachings of Jesus described in the Bible. The rules of the universe. The ones that necessitated that the death of the purest human on earth needed to be killed in order for God to have a new relationship with man, is abhorrent. It is one thing if that was just the way things were. But they aren't. The Christian God decided they had to be the way. The Christian God decided that people who did not accept Jesus had to go to hell for eternity. This is his design. This God's moral standards do not even measure up to the moral standards of modern western civilization. I don't see any evidence of divinity in these ideas. To me this smells of bronze age thinking.

It is this sort of stupidity that I think the creationists could use as an effective argument against evolution.
- The fact that SO MANY people have no ability to take any responsibility for their actions and the fact that people don't overwhelmingly blast them for their insane helplessness seems to be some level of proof that humans have no evolved traits for any self responsibility. I would expect that self responsibility would have to be part of any sort of evolved survival traits.

(or maybe we need to release more tigers in our cities to get the old awareness going again...)

Personal responsibility is an invented concept driven by societal needs. Fundamental evolution doesn't work well with the concept. In fact shuffling responsibility onto others and suckering them into dealing with it is a fantastic survival strategy we can see throughout the animal kingdom.

Oh lord isn't that the truth, to get to my GF's place you have to drive through a trailer park to get to the side road her place is on and....damn. It just blows my mind how you will see these folks living in squalor, everything around them falling apart, yet the women all have kids like stair steps, we are talking 4+ kids on average, all squeezed into these little bitty single wide trailers from the 60s and 70s, I had to show my girl Idiocracy because she asked when I went through there to take her home wh

Cool story bro, but median (raw) IQ scores have been rising for decades if not centuries.

The median IQ score is, by definition, 100....

While the specific skills being taught to obtain that median are different today than they were 200 years ago, I would hardly be as bold as to say that we're smarter today than we were back then. You very likely couldn't survive on your own 200 years ago, or even 100 years ago most likely, because most of us lack skills that would have been considered basic survival. In an agrarian pre-industrial society, your average computer geek would be considered very much a fool.

Case in point, the standard education given 150 years ago included multiple languages, classics, history, literature, logic, and mathematics. In order to graduate from University, you had to be proficient in all of these. Latin and quite often Greek were not optional, nor were the major European languages: English, Spanish, French, and German. Today, we teach a *very* different array of skills as a base point, but it's not any harder or easier for us than it was for them.

About the only basis for your point that actually makes some sense is that nutrition, especially in early childhood, has a *huge* impact on your brain development and performance later in life, but even that's a bit of a failing argument: our nutrition today is worse than it was 50 years ago because of the prevalence of junk food in the modern diet and the sedentary nature of the modern lifestyle.

Damn, I wish I could remember the book I perused from a Toronto professor stating that rape was obviously an evolutionary trait to improve the species... morality and evolution really don't get along when you think about it.

This is the exact opposite. Humans are selfish and self-serving like no other species can be. This is a direct result of natural selection. Your ancestors weren't the ones holding the door so people could get through, they were the ones trampling old women and children to get theirs first. More recently however, helplessness is a trait that is bred and perpetuated by a society that is ok with just accepting things as is without explanation.

"How did the universe get here? I dunno, God did it." What is more lazy and helpless than that? It's pretty thematic through out the whole ID debate. Acceptance in spite of investigation and evidence to the contrary. That is the epitome of a lazy and entitled attitude IMHO.

"How did the universe get here? I dunno, God did it." What is more lazy and helpless than that?

I don't know about that. It takes a lot of dedicated effort to remain willfully ignorant in today's era of information overload.

"God did it" made reasonably sense when the state of human knowledge was such that we couldn't have known better. And "God did it" is still a reasonable (if unlikely) reason for the Big Bang happening in the first place. People who want to want to reconcile science and religion are welcome to do so on levels like that if it makes them happy.

But trying to claim that the world started 6000 years ago when we can date things back millions or billions of years with proven methods are just out to lunch. The absolutely best they can claim is that the devil (or maybe God himself, to "test" us -- ie: make sure we don't try to use the big old brains He gave us) purposely laced our planet with particular datable isotopes and geographic strata and whatever else the smart people use to (reasonably) accurately date things (accuracy within 1% is a reasonable accuracy in many cases, even if it means a potential real error of a million years, for example.)

Actually I would say it proves evolution, specifically that because we humans have evolved with a small tribe mentality (protecting our own small sphere instead of looking at humanity as a whole) and an instinct to protect those in our tribe we are creating a "march of the morons" situation by having a civilization that allows truly stupid people like in TFA to have offspring, thus spreading the stupid like a jackass rolling a porta potty downhill spreads shit.

Humanity has NEVER had a high percentage of smart, responsible people. And we're still trending towards a smarter populace (more people with at least a BA and such metrics.) Also being a more responsible populace is questionable but that's digressing a bit.

Humanity's cogs have always been the grunts -- they're plentiful and replaceable. But our leaps and bounds have come from the very very few superstars -- the Newtons and Einsteins and Teslas of the world are the ones who progress us.

The rest of us mass of grunts get to benefit from the achievements of the few visionaries and progress marches on. But there's never been a time when more than a fraction of a percent of humanity has been "smart" in the world-moving (even a small corner of the world) sense. There has of course been times when certain factions have tried to suppress the few visionaries that do pop up during their rule.

Overall my point is that visionary intelligence is more likely the genetic mistake among a (comparatively) stupid population rather than some goal we're supposed to be moving towards -- as others have pointed out, evolution favors your reproduction far far more than it favors your contributions to other peoples' lives.

Dude while you may be correct that real geniuses with vision have probably stayed at the same level when I was a kid we at least had a high percentage with what we called "street smarts" or basic common sense, now we seem to be creating people that are too fucking stupid as to even understand basic cause and effect, see the woman who fed nothing but Mickey D's to her kids for a decade and then tried to sue because she didn't know a decade of 24/7 fast food would make kids fat and diabetic as just one of a billion examples I could post here.

Maybe its because when I was a kid any woman that had a litter of kids by different men would have been looked upon as a whore and the guys who fathered those kids as worthless scum if they didn't step up but you didn't see the whole "half a dozen kids with half a dozen dead beat dads living like animals" shit like you do today. Hell when I come back from my babe's place, even late at night, I had to dodge kids just running loose like dogs, its seriously fucked up man, and its no wonder we are breeding so many dumbasses when you have kids that aren't being taught shit and left to run loose like animals needless to say their little brains are gonna get exactly jack and shit for stimulation.

At the end of the day you could take the smartest baby on the planet and put them in a house where nobody bothers to even talk to the kid and the babysitter is reality shows and they'll grow up to be just another moron on the march, you have to put in real effort and do the work when it comes to kids. I should know as I raised my two nephews as my sister lay dying and her ex, their father? Idiot. yet they are both HIGHLY intelligent and I would attribute that to constantly giving them new things to learn and do, if they wanted to play a video game? i would show them how the game was made, so that they knew how everything worked, i even let them build their own PCs at 11 years old, explaining how each piece they were installing worked and how the ones and zeroes were turned into images on a screen.

Maybe I'm just old fashioned but unless a kid has brain damage or some other mental defect if a kid ends up booger eating stupid i tend to blame the parents. Naturally they can't all be Einsteins but if there is two things little kids loooove its finding out how things work and using their imagination. If the parents would actually give a fuck instead of just letting their kids run wild and ignoring them? Then i think we could avert the march of the morons. Instead sadly it will more likely be like what i saw when I'd pick the boys up from one of their friends houses, a place without so much as a magazine in the house and parents that would just sit watching stupid shit that was the equivalent of "Oww my balls" while making sure junior had a console and a set to keep him out of their hair. Its no damned wonder we have so many dumbasses per square foot now, that is the seeds that society has sewn.

I'm wondering if this particular Sevier lives in Sevierville. Seveirville is named after John Sevier, a pioneer settler to the region. That part of the state has literally thousands of people with some variant on Sevier as their last name; Mostly Seviers, but with Siviers, Seebers, Seibers, Severs, and even a few Xaviers. I know of only one sex shop in the Sevierville area, but I don't think it's out of business. (It calls itself "Sexy Stuf", and the ex and I don't patronize places that can't spell, but it looked open when we stopped at the Smoky Mountain Knife Museum (It's like a four story mall full of knife dealers, with taxidermied animals and indoor waterfalls, and I'd bet Mr. Sevier would love it if he can stop focusing on sex so much).
Knoxville, 30 miles away or so, has lots of sex stores still open last I checked - Adult Superstore, Fantasy World, Intimate Treasures, Romantic Escapades, and others. Town and Country seems to be fading fast, but they're kinda disquieting (as in labeling the plus-size video's "fattyporn", and clerks who seem oddly judgemental), so I really doubt it's apple putting them out of business.

For those not following your link: Sevier lost his law license in 2011 after the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled he can’t practice due to reasons of mental illness. New reports reveal his disability is related to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome from his time serving in Iraq.

Who cares, let them do whatever they want. They can file as many suits as they want and, each time, a jury will be able to decide if Apple is the group that is ultimately responsible for some guy who got himself addicted to porn. While he's at it, he can sue Ford for allowing him to drive to the convenience store to buy beer and fuel his alcohol addiction, because that is obviously Ford's fault since they don't ship their cars with a mode that makes the car unable to drive to the convenience store to buy

"Addicted to porn" is not an issue I think would stand up in court. It may be a deep penetrating issue, but all it does is allow us to watch a bunch of people get screwed. Watching evidence I'd have a really hard time too. In the end he'll probably get off.

but seriously we don't blame the heroine or meth for a junkie becoming a junkie.

We do, however, blame the guy standing on the street corner handing out free samples of dope trying to get people hooked.

I blame them for being less perfect than I am, just like this dude is.

FTFY. Humans are an imperfect animal with build in chemical and psychological pathways that can lead to dependency on many different kinds of things. Some people have had enough support early in their lives that they haven't made bad decisions that lead them down the bad pathways; some people haven't. That doesn't make the person pathetic or weak or even simple, it just makes him human.

Smokers didn't sue their local convenience stores where they bought their smokes, they sued the manufacturers of said tobacco products

What's even more bullshit, is that in this case, it is more like suing the company which built the truck used to haul the cigarettes from the factory to the convenience store. At least the convenience store made the conscious decision to sell cigarettes there. The truck company just built a damn truck, which happens to work on highways and is capable of moving cigarettes.

But... there already ARE filters on by default. The app store doesn't seem have anything that would rate higher than a PG-13. Safari's default search engine was at least google, maybe they've changed it, but google has safesearch on by default. It's not like you say "Siri, I like dogs" and it goes right to a gallery of people having doggystyle sex.

...

I guess I'm assuming that religious groups would think about it first. You may be right.

Probably has to do with the idea that the common welfare is maintained by everyone in a classless society. So if you're being addicted to something like porn or drugs, you are not just hurting yourself, you're hurting everyone.

There are and were a number of "morality" pushes by communist countries. Granted, a lot of that was the fact that becoming a communist doesn't change some basic ideas that people have about morality. Most people aren't for or against porn or drugs because God says not to do them, t

* "[...] everyone should share everything equally" - hahaha! sorry, but i find that also naive...

Like it or not, that's what communism stands for. The fact that it was implemented poorly (or not at all) by many supposedly communist (but actually fascist, totalitarian) states is neither here nor there.

False flag for those who do not know is what the government or any organization does to distract the not-so-smart people while a more sinister plan is enacted. In short: "Look a flying saucer!" meanwhile "BANG!" something blows up.

Incorrect:

False flag (or black flag) describes covert military or paramilitary operations designed to deceive in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities, groups or nations than those who actually planned and executed them.

Re-using your example: Government agents blow up a hospital and make it appear that a flying saucer (or Al Queda, some militia group, etc.) was actually to blame.

Well ya if you want to believe that Wikipedia is the endall source of information...but...in today's world: "False flag terrorism" occurs when elements within a government stage a secret operation whereby government forces pretend to be a targeted enemy while attacking their own forces or people.

You must be drunk. You just repeated your parent.

For example, a "false flag operation" is a terrorist act committed by one group for the express purpose of discrediting another group, which is framed for it. Just sayin...

The fool. He picks up an internet connected device marked with the symbol of man's descent into sin(and nakedness) and then is surprised when his concupiscent flesh is besotted with unclothed harlots? Isn't that the most plausible outcome?

Then the computer goes crazy! and downloads hundreds of things you never explicitly asked for. Some are porn. Some are ads. Some are probably viruses. And some are more text to download more more more. 1 click = 100s of downloads.

If this continues, every item sold within the US is going to have a 89-page disclaimer. It is bad enough that insulated cups have warnings about the contents being hot, now electronic devices need to have a disclaimer about the internet having pornography? This guy is literally, blaming the messenger (company that makes the device), for this his own actions and lack of self-control. Plenty of people can use the internet and even peruse sexual content without having their lives destroyed.

Maybe he should have tried getting a life and setting his priorities, instead of watching the Farrah Abraham video.

I remember a time when people were expected to take responsibility for their own actions. The world was a much better place then.

Now everyone who engages in anti-social / psychopathic behavior is a "victim". We blame government. We blame society. And best of all, we blame inanimate objects. But under no circumstances can we point out that the guy actually chose to behave in the way he did, and that he is entirely, 100% to blame for the situation he finds himself in.

(I'm not saying that viewing pornography is "in general" anti-social behavior, however, within the context of the boundaries of his marriage, it apparently qualified.)

Oh, because it's got naked women in it! Look, I like naked women! I'm a bloke! I'm supposed to like them! We're born like that. We like naked women as soon as we're pulled out of one. Halfway down the birth canal we're already enjoying the view. Look, it's the four pillars of the male heterosexual psyche. We like: naked women, stockings, lesbians, and Sean Connery best as James Bond. Because that is what being a bloke is. And if you don't like it, darling, join a film collective. I want to spend the rest of my life with the woman at the end of the table here. But that does not stop me wanting to see several thousand more naked bottoms before I die. Because that's what being a bloke is. When Man invented fire, he didn't say "Hey, let's cook!" He said: "Great! Now we can see naked bottoms in the dark!" As soon as Caxton invented the printing press we were using it to make pictures of - hey! - naked bottoms. We've turned the Internet into an enormous international database of... naked bottoms. So, you see, the story of male achievement through the ages, feeble though it may have been, has been the story of our struggle to get a better look at your bottoms. Frankly, girls, I'm not so sure how insulted you really ought to be.

For several years, pornography ruled my life. I lost my family over it. I lost my self respect over it. It was causing such deep depression that I nearly lost my life over it. Being in IT, I could get around any filters. If I wanted porn online, I found porn online. Simple as that. I finally broke my addiction to it and got my life back together. So, I feel the pain of the person who TFA speaks of.

That all being said...

This. Is. Stupid. Why not just sue The Internetz and your ISP and your carrier and every person who's ever produced pornography, and Samsung for making iPhone screens and... you get the point.

Stopping the addiction does not rely on Apple blocking porn on your iPhone. It involves taking responsibility, getting help, and STOPPING.

I too am a recovering porn addict. 15 months 'sober.' There is much that could be discussed about the causes of, and methods of overcoming, a porn addiction, but blaming the manufacturers of devices is ludicrous. My last look at porn was on an iPad - which I no longer have.

With statistics showing that 50% or more of men now look at porn regularly, porn addiction is a pretty big deal. And no - it's not just a religious sort of thing. It's a ruining marriage, losing job, lost productivity, wasted time and money and quality of life sort of thing.

Thanks to both of you for sharing this - I think it's an important point of view not often heard. A porn addiction can cause as much trouble as addiction to alcohol or controlled substances, and it is even more ubiquitous - you can always find it for free, and without ever being seen in public.

But this guy's case is without merit. It's like suing a grocery store for selling liquor to an alcoholic. I'm sorry, but personal responsibility here is the answer.

How do you not temp yourself.I know alcoholics just (according to movies) never touch alcohol again.But it would be pretty hard to never see a video with erotic content ever again. Hell, you cannot even watch Disney without seeing erotic content.

One could also argue that the near ubiquitous availability of porn is simply allowing men to get what they want without a lot of hassle. Namely dating, courtship, and maintenance of a girlfriend/wife who, while attractive, good company, and (hopefully) a very good friend, simply does not live up to the task of keeping the mans sexual drive satisfied.

Porn addiction should be looked at in a couple different directions.The first is the direction that is being talked about so far in this discussion, namely of men who can't control themselves and spiral out of control with an addiction.

Another direction to look is what kind of family life does he have? Does his gf/wife make sure to tend to his needs? Does she care enough about him to get interested in things that he enjoys, sex among them? If there is sex, is it kept interesting? Or has it gotten incredibly stale and any attempts to make it interesting have been failures, either because they just didn't work, or worse, because the woman had no interest in exploring those options and simply expected the man to be satisfied with what he had? Or is this man in a worst case scenario where he has tried his best to find companionship, only to be left out in the cold and judged as not worth anyone's time in a relationship?

What a lot of people need to come to terms with is simply that people have sexual urges. For extensive periods of time our societies have placed a great amount of weight on suppressing those urges and judging them to be "unclean", meaning that only the boldest or most well connected had access to avenues of sexual experimentation. Now with porn literally everywhere, everyone can experience, at least at a distance, almost anything sexually imaginable. The game has changed, quite literally.

With sexual freedom comes a lot of people discovering urges they may never have been able to realize they had. And to be honest up to this point the majority of those people discovering themselves sexually have been men. Women are getting there, but it is taking them longer because of natures built in sexual imbalances. And this is one of the main parts of the problem.

Men have discovered that they want more than to just take a girl out to dinner and a movie on a regular basis, and if they are lucky, they get to have sex on rare occasion. Men have discovered that they want to have sex a lot more often than in the past and women are taking a long time to adapt to these new sexual demands.

Women hold the keys to the sexual kingdom quite closely and refuse to open the gates unless great sacrifice is made in order to get there. Men have simply started to decide that the price of admission is too high, and they are choosing substitutions that are more easily accessible.

As misogynistic as it sounds, the porn problem is caused in part by women making themselves unrealistically unavailable when demand has never been higher. The same thing happens in any high demand, low supply market. High demand and unavailability of any alternatives means everyone competes tooth and nail to pay top dollar for one unit of the coveted item. Then something else that works to satisfy the same demand comes along and suddenly everyone starts to wonder why they're paying out the ass for the cow when the imitation milk is damn near free.

It's simple economics only with sex as the currency. Men want sex but are tired of having to pay for the hassle of dates that may not be enjoyable, relationships that become stale after so long, and escalating costs for lower and lower returns. Until women start to become sexually open as well, porn will continue to be a huge problem for society because men gotta have it, and now they don't need women to get it anymore.

Porn addiction is the end result of mens biological imperative being artificially suppressed for thousands of years by societies that looked down on it and left most men with little to no way of actually expressing it, and suddenly removing that suppression by way of all manner of se

While I think he's completely crazy to blame his addiction on Apple, the 'Safe-Mode' is not an altogether bad idea. Wouldn't it be nice to know your kids new MacBook had sex simply turned off?

It would take them days, perhaps even weeks to find a way to circumnavigate the measure. Just think how much our kids could learn about BSD! The really aspirational ones might even learn to cover their tracks with a terminal and Vim!

Assuming that Safe Mode is a mode that the owner can turn off and on, isn't that just the same as just not going to the porn sites? At least if you are the owner and an adult and not playing the "think of the children" game?

His offer sounds like he either wants to impose his values on others, or he knows that such "safe surfing" isn't really technically feasible so he can make to offer to sound like he's a decent guy rather than a pervert trying to profit big.

Blaming a device maker for your actions with it shows a complete lack of self-responsibility and requires a child-like understanding of one's own self-control. I can see this guy testifying before Congress or whomever in favor of legal requirements for some sort of restricted mode, because he can't control himself, so everyone else should have to bear a burden of increased cost. A potential legal requirement would be easily met by Apple, but FOSS could be further limited by such laws, as not meeting requirements for schools, etc.

This is different from accessibility requirements, since the folks who need those cannot simply choose to see/hear. All this guy had to do was put the infernal device down.

WTF is going on with people these days? It seems over the last decade or so, our actual civil liberties - you know, the right to free expression, bearing arms, freedom from search/seizure without warrant - seem to be slowly fading out, while a brand new set of perceived rights is taking their place. Seriously, what the fuck is up with that?

FWIW, there is no such thing as:

the Right to Not be Offendedthe Right to Determine What Rights Other People Havethe Right to Feel Safe

Sevier claims that his addiction started when he “accidentally” replaced the “a-c-e” in Facebook with a “u-c-k.” Sevier said this F***book site “appealed to his biological sensibilities as a male,” and he started to prefer the images on the screen to his own wife.

Man, that happens to me all the time. One time, I reached for the skim milk and accidentally drank a 40oz bottle of vodka.

Another time, I was making a peanut butter sandwich and accidentally injected heroin into an artery.

According to this comment [arstechnica.com] in the ArsTechnica discussion of their report on this story [arstechnica.com], the plantiff is actually a suspended lawyer who was formerly deployed and is now dealing with mental illness.

Maybe the commenter is taking the piss, but really... that's the only explanation that makes any sense.

I wonder how far that strategy will work with a speeding ticket, lets just call it entrapment that they designed a car that knowning violates the law when a simple technical solution could be implemented to make the car never exceed the posted limit.

In all seriousness though, I'd pay $2k to $3k extra for a button in a car that you could push to make it cruise exactly at the posted limit, as well as never exceed the limit going down hills, and it logs sensor data that can be used in court. It won't happen however, these fine only violations are what law enforcement calls their bread and butter.

This smells of the guy trying to provide an option that makes it sound like he's not in it just for the money, but which you can be pretty sure the company is not going to do. Apple isn't likely to put tons of development into something like that just based on this lawsuit. So he gets to feel like he's suing for a good reason, when he's really just hoping for a settlement somewhere below the cost for Apple to implement a "safe mode".

Actually, I think this story smells more like a guy from a very conservatively religious community who is trying to shift blame away from him to Apple, saying he was helpless to avoid his divorce or viewing of porn. The article mentions that he talks about things like the ACLU inventing homosexuality in the 50s, and about God and how porn affects man's spirituality. This, or he has a certifiable mental illness, because a lot of his claims noted in the article make no sense and have no bearing on his argum

Let's add that the US media run the most shocking, bizarre, or outrage-causing stories they can find, regardless of the actual importance of the events. Since our population is over 300 million, you can manage to find a couple of those stories every day if you have thousands of reporters scouring the country. Then they harp on those stories for weeks. This gives the impression that everyone in the USA is some kind of freak.

What disturbs me is the number of people here who believe it -- who carry a gun because they actually believe they'll get attacked, or who think they'll get sued if someone spills hot coffee.

So perhaps stupid lawsuits like this occur (rarely) in other countries as well, but the media don't deem them newsworthy so you don't hear about them.

Just because you might never have been a victim of violent crime - which has a tendency to concentrate itself in certain geographic areas, including the one where I was born and still live today - does not mean everyone else is so fortunate. I grew up in what would now be considered the ghetto. From the time I started working around age 10 (delivering papers), until the time I got a car and moved to the suburbs, which was when I was in my early 20s, I was violently assaulted roughly every year. About two thirds of those times I fought off my attackers with a deadly weapon (although none of those times ever resulted injury to anyone - I only needed to display it for them, cowardly bullies they were, to turn around and run off). One time I was able to run to safety and another time I was able to lock myself in a room until the attackers left. But on the remaining 2 or 3 occasions I was beaten badly and robbed of everything I had on me. I was very lucky I did not get shot (there were guns pointed at me on all those occasions as well as one or two of the others). Now that I don't have to hang out at bus stops at weird hours of the night, and live in a relatively safe part of town, that kind of stuff doesn't happen to me anymore, but at one time it did, and during that time, the fact that I was armed very likely saved my life. Some of the people I grew up with have similar stories, and one of them (that I know of) was brutally murdered, for no apparent reason, 2 or 3 months ago. You may be sheltered enough not to have to worry about this sort of thing, but a lot of us are not so fortunate, and I think I can speak on behalf of many of them, at least, when I tell you that their decision of whether and how to arm, train, and protect themselves and those around them is absolutely none of anyone else's business.

How could that possibly work? He's actively looking for pr0n, so he'd simply turn off any controls that inhibit that.

And if he couldn't, then he'd go out and get a laptop or something else to feed his addiction with. If he cancelled his ISP, soon he'd be out piggybacking on his neighbors feed, or hanging around the shadier internet cafes...

What, does he think that alcoholics are cured just because their local grocery store is out of beer or decided not to carry it anymore?

Land of the free = land of "you're responsible for your own damn actions"